Eduardo the Samurai Toaster Review

Why are those carrots throwing turkey legs at me?

Eduardo the Samurai Toaster was created by a very small team of just four guys at Semnat Studios. It's impressive that they were able to pull it off and get it up on WiiWare by themselves, but it unfortunately didn't turn out to be a very compelling gameplay experience. Eduardo begins with an interesting title screen that sets up what might be an art house game, perhaps something like last year's Braid. But once you start your adventure you'll find a generic run-and-gun action game that can pretty much be completed by holding right on the D-pad and mashing the fire button.

Players can use either their remote held horizontally or the Classic Controller. Manipulating Eduardo is very simple in the grand tradition of side-scrolling action games. The D-pad moves our hero and determines where he is aiming. The 1 button fires projectiles while 2 jumps. The B trigger will grab and throw a nearby enemy or bullet. When you're close enough to an enemy pressing the fire button will perform a melee attack. The usual power-ups can be found by defeating bad guys: shotgun, spread shot, homing missiles, machine gun…

The game has an interesting art style that changes from level to level. Artist/Director Daniel Coleman scanned the graphics from a variety of media such as charcoal and acrylic paint. The backgrounds sometimes impress, but the character design is generic and the few enemy types are repeated throughout the game. Hope you like the first level boss because that's who you're gonna fight at the end of every stage. The changing art style is nice and all but I can't think of a reason for it except "because we can."

Eduardo lacks any sort of context. He's a toaster who has to kill thousands of bees and carrots, but exactly why is anyone's guess. It's hard to tell what some of the enemies even are. I'm going to guess the standard enemies are some sort of playing cards, but your guess is as good as mine. For that matter, I can't tell what the enemies are shooting at me. Turkey legs? Coconuts? Globs of feces? Could be any of the above. I'm pretty sure Eduardo fires slices of toast, though. Which begs another question: what, besides his hair bun, makes Eduardo a samurai? He doesn't wield a sword and doesn't appear to be an ancient Japanese aristocrat.

The default difficulty setting gives you infinite lives and it took me around an hour and a half to play through all 13 levels. Your progress is saved after each level and you can jump to any completed stage from the title screen. Up to four toasters can join the action and work through the game cooperatively, and the experience becomes marginally more fun if only because you can throw your friends around. But there's no getting around the shallow, repetitive gameplay.

The Verdict

It's nice to see an indie developer putting its first game out on WiiWare and I think Semnat Studios shows a lot of potential. But this initial offering is too shallow and generic to recommend. It's got an interesting art style and a cute hero, but there's nothing here to really sink your teeth into. Gunstar Heroes perfected this sort of run-and-gun game back in 1993, and it's still much more inventive than Eduardo the Samurai Toaster is. That said, I'll be watching for what Semnat does next with its talented artist and playful sense of humor.